“No,” said Hero, reaching out to take the gun from Lady Sewell’s hand. She expected the woman to resist, but she did not. “No. Your younger sister needs your comfort and support, and he’s not worth hanging for.”
“Yet if I’d killed him before, Rachel wouldn’t be here.”
Hero stared down at the row of unmarked graves. “Don’t blame yourself. You can’t be certain of that.”
“You know it’s true,” said Rachel’s sister.
Hero’s fist tightened around the gun in her hand. “You can’t blame yourself,” she said again, even though she knew there was nothing she could say, nothing anyone could do that would ever take away the crushing burden of this woman’s guilt.
It was several hours later that a lad playing catch with his dog on Bethnal Green stumbled across the decomposing remains of another body.
“Is it a woman?” asked Sir Henry Lovejoy, holding his folded handkerchief to his nose as he peered into the weed-filled ditch.
“Looks like it, sir,” said one of the constables, standing ankle deep in the murky water, his hat pulled low against the drizzle. “What you want we should do with ’er?”
“Take the body to the surgery of Paul Gibson, near Tower Hill,” said Lovejoy, his eyes watering from the stench. “And you—” He beckoned to the lad still hovering nearby with his dog. “I’ve a crown for you, if you’ll take a message to Brook Street.”
Chapter 56
When Sebastian arrived at Tower Hill, Paul Gibson was downing a tankard of ale in his kitchen. The surgeon had stripped down to his breeches and shirtsleeves, and even from across the room, Sebastian could smell the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him. Mrs. Federico was nowhere in sight.
“Is it Hessy Abrahams?” Sebastian asked.
“Could be,” said Gibson, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “She’s the right age. But she’s beyond identification, I’m afraid.”
Sebastian knew a spurt of disappointment. “How did she die?”
“Her neck’s broken. But it’s the way it’s broken that’s interesting. Come, I’ll show you.”
Suppressing a groan, Sebastian followed the Irishman down to the end of the garden, through a swarm of buzzing flies, and into a room so thick with the reek of death it made his eyes water. “Good God,” said Sebastian, holding his handkerchief to his nose. “How do you stand it?”
“You get used to it,” said Gibson, tying a stained apron over his clothes.
After nearly two weeks, Hessy Abrahams’s body—if this was indeed Hessy Abrahams—was in an advanced state of decomposition, the flesh blistered and suppurating and hideously discolored. It took all of Sebastian’s concentration to keep from losing what little he’d eaten of Madame LeClerc’s delicate nuncheon.
“Do you know what happens when someone dies of a broken neck?” Gibson asked, picking up a scalpel and what looked like a pair of pincers.
“Not exactly, no.”
Standing at the corpse’s throat, Gibson peeled back some of the decaying flesh to reveal the bone beneath. “The top seven bones in your spine form your neck. Basically, they’re part of your backbone, but they also serve to protect the spinal cord that runs through here—” He broke off, pointing. “You can break your neck and be all right as long as you don’t damage your spinal cord. If you break the lower part of your neck and do injure the cord, you lose the use of your legs and maybe your arms, too, depending on which vertebrae you break.”
Sebastian nodded. He’d seen a lot of men crippled by their injuries in the war.
“But if the neck breaks up here,” said Gibson, indicating the first several bones, “and the spinal cord is injured, then a person basically suffocates. They can’t breathe.”
Sebastian took one look, then glanced away. “How long does that take?”
“About two to four minutes.”
“Is that what happened to this woman?”
“No. You see, there’s another way to die from a broken neck. If the neck is twisted so sharply the spinal cord is torn in half, it affects your heart and the circulation of the blood.”
“And you die?”
“Almost instantly. You see it sometimes when a hanging goes well. Of course, they don’t often go well.”
Sebastian forced himself to look, again, at the desiccated form on Gibson’s dissection table. “How was her neck broken?”
“The spinal cord was snapped. The man I was treating after he stopped Miss Jarvis on the way back from Richmond had his neck snapped in exactly the same way. I didn’t attach much importance to it at the time, but after I saw this, I got to thinking. So I spoke to the surgeon at St. Thomas’s who performed the postmortem on Sir William Hadley. He was killed the same way. So was the Cyprian found in the Haymarket, Tasmin Poole.”
Sebastian raised his gaze to his friend’s face. “This is significant. Why?”
“It’s not an easy thing to do, to break a neck like this. It requires training.”
“We already suspected these men were military.”
“Yes. But learning how to kill silently with a quick snapping of the neck isn’t part of most officers’ training. The thing is,” said Gibson, laying aside his instruments, “I’ve seen necks snapped like this before. Over the last three or four years, we’ve probably had a dozen or more cases.”
Sebastian studied his friend’s tight, worried face, not understanding at all. “And?”
“No one investigates those deaths,” said Gibson. “Some are common people—government clerks, French émigrés. But some are more prominent. You recall when Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton were found dead last autumn? Their necks were broken. Just like this.”
The realization of what Gibson was saying spread through Sebastian like a strange numbing sensation. Sir Humphrey Carmichael and Lord Stanton, along with an East India Company man named Atkinson, had all died for the same reason. “And Felix Atkinson? He was killed the same way?”
“Yes.”
Sebastian walked out of the dank, foul-smelling building into the sunlit garden. Last night’s rain had cleansed the dust from the air, leaving the sky scrubbed so clean and blue it nearly hurt the eyes to look at it. “It makes no sense,” said Sebastian, aware of Gibson coming to stand beside him.
“I didn’t think so. But then I thought maybe I was missing something.”
Sebastian shook his head. A hideous possibility dawned, that all of this—the attack on the Magdalene House, Miss Jarvis’s interest in solving the riddle of Rachel Fairchild’s fall from grace and subsequent murder, even that poignant brush with death beneath the ancient gardens of Somerset House—had all been a part of some diabolical charade designed by Jarvis to draw him into . . . what? And for what purpose?